To say that an international artist can be hugely influential in Australia, where their work has rarely been seen​, is to pay testament not just to the aesthetic qualities of their work but also to the appeal of the ideas behind it.

German-born Gerhard Richter is one such artist. Since the early 1960s he has explored a number of related themes and ideas, producing paintings and photographs that question the nature of the images that can be produced by both mediums. Through magazines and books, and later the web, Richter’s work has been the subject of intense interest by many Australian artists – even when access to it meant trips to galleries in Europe or the US.

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Now, the 85-year-old German artist is the subject of a major career survey show, Gerhard Richter: The Life of Images, which opened this weekend at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane.

With a collection of work that spans Richter’s entire career, and featuring key loans from European, American and Australian collections, this a major coup for the gallery. While the exhibition itself is a standout for both its rigour and range of work, it’s also an opportunity to explore why Richter has had such an influence in Australia.

A Facebook friend, who has been involved in art book retailing for more than a decade, posted recently that books about Richter’s work have been hugely popular for many years, and only in the last decade have they been eclipsed by books on perennial favourites Banksy and David Shrigley. On the basis of the pure visual appeal of Richter’s painting, it’s easy to see why.

Trained in East Germany in the classical art of realist painting, Richter’s images have the quiet stillness of European masterworks, taking in genres such as the still life, landscape and portraiture, but of contemporary subjects that are often rendered like a slightly out of focus photograph.

For Richter this “fuzzy” focus is a way of depicting memory, but it also has an ironic edge since many of Richter’s images are appropriated from the media. Collecting images since the beginning of his career, Richter has compiled thousands of photographs into a vast archive that includes personal and family pictures, all exhibited together under the title Atlas Overview (1962-ongoing).

Since the early 1960s, Richter has explored a variety of styles, including various flavours of abstraction, from hard edge stripes to the faux expressionism of squashing paint under glass or dragging it across the canvas with a squeegee. His early works in the 60s, painted from images sourced from the media, were parodies of the then-ascendant international styles of American Pop Art and the postwar culture and economic boom in West Germany at the time.

After forming and then promptly disbanding the satirical art movement Capitalist Realism, founded with fellow German artists Sigmar Polke and Konrad Leug, Richter would go on to explore the nature of image making, testing the limits of what might be called a photo, and what might be considered a painting.

For Richter, that tactile thingyness of a painting stands in contrast to the ephemeral nature of the photo – particularly the way images appear online, weightless and without material form.

He has painted on photos, painted over photos, and questioned the possibility of literally representing monumental tragedy, such as the series Birkenau (2014): four imposing works that had begun life as images of the Nazi death camp of the title, but then painted over to become inscrutable abstracts.

This kind of interest in the language and meaning of image making found resonance in Australian art, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s, as the dominance of expressionist painting began to wane and a more conceptual, playful and ironic postmodern art emerged. The Popism artists in Melbourne in the mid-1980s – including Maria Kozic, Phillip Brophy and Peter Tyndall, among others – owe no obvious visual allegiance to Richter’s work, but he was conceptually influential, as was his sense of irony.

Richter’s continuing influence can be found today in the work of painters who investigate the relationship between the photographic image and painting, and its reproduction in painting, including Halinka Orszulok, Tony Lloyd, Victoria Reichelt and Sam Leach. Earlier this year, the National Gallery of Victoria showed the first comprehensive exhibition of Melbourne-based artist Patrick Pound; titled The Great Exhibition, it was a testament to the influence of Richter’s Atlas Overview on the Australian artist’s work – an influence that Pound himself paid tribute to in his talk at Goma.As an artist, Richter represents a practice of making art that is both remarkably consistent, even within his varying styles, and the result of deep thinking on the implications of making images.

One of the lessons of Richter’s work for Australian art is the way in which he has treated history. Along with his Birkenau paintings, one of Richter’s most famous images is the small portrait Uncle Rudi (1965). Dressed in his SS uniform, Uncle Rudi smiles at the viewer amidst a smear of grey and black paint. Made during his Pop period alongside images of clothes dryers, fighter jets and celebrities, there’s a suggestion of an equivalence of moral context in mass media images – the personal and family history at the same level as world historical events.

But for a German artist in the postwar period, to acknowledge family participation in the Nazi holocaust is remarkable. For all Richter’s influence here, it’s hard to imagine a white Australian artist acknowledging a family member’s happy participation in the Frontier Wars. Certainly not one smiling so serenely.